I actually bought a netbook specifically so I wouldn't waste money trying to upgrade it. It should always be able to browse, IM, ssh, and type simple documents. Any upgrade money is specifically designated for the desktop.
Even with such plugins, I've finally given up on the load of shit at CNN.com. When a misclick on a trackpad sent me to a bare list of 25 things it was OK to lie about in a relationship, I was pushed over the edge. To link an oprah-inspired, content-less list from the main page is the height of stupidity.
BBC news, my local (crappy) newspaper, and NPR are my online news sources now. The only thing that will save journalism is when news organizations stop fucking around, and start doing their god damn job. Cutting staff and making flash widgits is not it. Repeating the same three "news" stories over and over all day is not it. Reporting on the latest "white female gone missing" is not it. Reporting on the daily "fear the terrorists" is not it. Reporting on the latest celebrity screwup is not it.
Your job is to report news. Fucking do it, and your job will be saved.
I'm a teacher. Probably one of the top tech-savvy ones at my school, and also a linux dork.
My sister's BF uses linux a lot now, since I pointed him to it. My sister also uses it a lot. As does my mom, who now, instead bitching about her "computer" bitches specifically about Microsoft. The linux side of her dual-boot gets nothing but praise.
In any school, 80% of the teachers don't really know how to use a computer. They really are novices. In this case, there is NO difference between Linux and Windows. They probably wouldn't notice a difference if you swapped out their Windows machine for a KDE machine. (Gnome is enough different that they might notice. MIGHT notice..)
Flashaback to my mom's computer. My sister (Windows-only librarian) wanted to steal some of mom's Christmas CDs. I suggested she infringe on the copyrights by making a copy. (She's got both eyes, and both legs, so I couldn't suggest piracy.) She booted into Kubuntu, popped the CD into one drive, a blank into the second, found K3b, and burned herself a couple of CDs.
If she can do that, with 0 assistance, I'm confident that most teachers could use linux as well as windows. But why does EVERY school run windows?
It's a combination of a few factors.
1) The Admins know that Windows runs on 80+% of the computers in the world, and have used it exclusively. 2) A technology grant (in my State, a lawsuit against MS got it for us) buys both the hardware AND gets free MS software with it. 3) One essential piece of software (Gradequick, in my case) runs on Windows only.
I talk to my head tech guy often about different flavors of linux, and our collective playing around with it. He's not ignorant. But when a settlement from MS pays for all the hardware AND software for our school, why would he reformat it to run linux? It would be incompatable with a few major applications, and a major pain in the ass, as we'd then be running two operating systems. For a small tech staff, with limited resources, homogeneity is a necessity. (But he's still made sure that my linux laptop can connect to the wireless.)
Have you looked into the APT tax? It was designed to tax transactions such as those you describe. In fact, that's ALL it taxes - transactions. Just a theory at the moment, but I can see where it's becoming very implementable.
To expand on this, a large percentage of the decent-to-amazing IT workers are smarter than their co-workers. All businesses need worker-ants. Bodies to answer phones, tally numbers, clean the offices, and interface with customers and higher-ups in the company.
None of these jobs explicitly requires intelligence. None of them require the ability to problem-solve, to creatively find solutions to seemingly impossible problems, to make things do things they aren't meant to do.
While I only spent a few years in IT, before moving into the job-security and summers-off of education, I realized this quite well. I also had co-workers who realized this, and would put in obscene hours "keeping the company afloat". I did not. Why? Because while I was smarter than a lot of my co-workers, I also realized that I would see NO benefit from busting my ass doing over-time work. There would be no promotion, no additional job security, no additional pay, no accolades from the higher-ups in the business.
I was pretty glad that this had been my attitude when lay-offs came, because they were pointy-haired-boss style. Our corporate overlord did random lay-offs. RANDOM! Not need-based, not performance-based, not cost-benefit-analysis-based. RANDOM! People who had been working there 2 weeks to 15 years got laid off in a mass purging, at RANDOM! Had I been busting my ass up until I got that pink slip, I would have been pissed. As were a couple of the account executives who had been putting in serious OT to save "important" accounts.
IT gets shat upon because IT lets it happen. Mix Ego with poor social skills, no backbone, and a fear of the uncertain, and it's all but certain that you'll get trod upon.
Saying "Fuck NO!" is as likely to get you fired/laid off as not saying anything at all. And it's far more satisfying.
Step 1) Delay Digital switchover. Step2) The US Govt buys stock in consumer electronic companies, along with Walmart. Step 3) Change over to digital broadcasting. 25% of users suddenly find out that their TV no longer works. Step 4) Issue the planned $500 tax rebate to all US taxpayers. Step 5) 25% of the country goes and buys a new TV or a converter box to make their TV work again. Step 6).... (You know what it is...and it's not acceptance...)
It wasn't just them. The captain of this ship is the one with his hands on the wheel. The original plan did not include a great deal of what ended up in the final project. While outside forces were at work, blame there lies squarely on the leadership of the project.
You are pretty much spot on. I'd clarify by saying that the 2 best ways to fix our energy problems are:
1) Raise electricity rates.
2) Mandate clear ratings to be placed on ALL electronics which state Maximum, Median, Sleep, and Off electricity usage.
Then your point about Capitalism would work just fine. The problem now is that it takes a third-party device like the kill-o-watt meter to determine these things for most consumer electronics. Remove that barrier, and the free market would have a much better chance of working.
Hop the border to your North-East then. In Vermont, it's legal to have a loaded handgun on the dashboard of your truck. (Or car, but who drives one of those things?) It's NOT legal to drive around with a loaded rifle, because you might shoot a deer with it. But pistols are fine. No handgun permit needed. There's no concealed carry law in the state, but individual cities sometimes have some variant, and you can't bring firearms into Schools and Courts. It seems that Government Buildings and Churches are fine.
As some friends of mine have explored, it's perfectly legal to tuck a loaded handgun into the back of you pants, drive down the the store, buy a gallon of milk, and drive back. As long as you aren't reckless or threatening, it's just fine.
(The same goes for nudity around here as well. No state law on public nudity, although some towns have them. It's perfectly legal to grab your wallet, get into your truck nude, drive to the store, walk in, buy a gallon of milk, and drive home. As long as you don't do anything obscene, you're fine. Despite this, we have few problems with either nudity or handguns. Or nudes with handguns. It's probably because a large part of this state is, oddly enough, very conservative. And we have winter, which severely curtails the amount of public nudity people are interested in engaging in.)
You are mostly correct in your assessment looking in. Our ties between financing campaigns and favors afterwards are well known and fairly well documented. While politicians occasionally get charged with corruption, I'd hazard a guess that it's probably only the top 1-2% of offenders, at best.
The one area you're not quite correct is in where the money actually comes from. This page shows summarized contributions from corporations, their Political Action Comities, and their employees. As you can see, it's far smaller than the total amount of funding Obama received. If you look at the voting records, Obama received around 62 million votes. If 5% of those individuals tossed $100 his direction, that's around half of his total funding, and 25 times more than he received from corporate ties.
In most elections, that would seem pretty high, and fairly unlikely. However, this was a pretty special case for us. As a whole, the country HATES President Bush. When McCain ran against Bush in 2000, he ran as a rebel, an anti-republican republican. After being crushed there, with the Bush campaign managing to smear his time as a POW and drawing into question the legitimacy of his daughter, he turned into Bush's lapdog. Nobody can really figure out why, but McCain went from being against much of the republican machine to being a cog in it.
Which such a public dislike for Bush, and with McCain viewed as being just more of the same, a lot more people in this election felt it was worth a couple hundred bucks to ensure that we would be able to get out of Iraq and fix our economy.
(But this doesn't mean that your complaint about corporate rule is in any-way unjustified. It's why I tell everyone we need another party, and it's why I refuse to vote for either party any more. )
What's the chance I can start a LLC to sell weed? I mean, doing illegal things and avoiding jail time seems to work for most large corporations. What's the size/financial cutoff where I won't go to jail?
I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. I installed Kubuntu 8.10, and never looked back. KDE 4.2 works fine, and does what I need it to do. Now I don't know if that's because I'm not a GUI-power-user or something, but what the hell?
I know a fair number of people who have had all sorts of issues with KDE 4. I haven't had a single problem. Granted I do most of my power-user work via the terminal, but I would have assumed I'd have seen one of the myriad of issues being reported. I'm trying to think of one, and failing. Maybe somewhat flakey wireless connections on my EEE?
The side effect of medicine occasionally kills a person, or a few. Perhaps a few thousand, if bad enough.
The side effects of geoengineering could kill EVERYTHING.
There should be at least some care taken before any major operation is undertaken, with that in mind.
Not to mention that it might interfere with my plan to buy up land in Florida a half-mile from the ocean, and sell it as waterfront property in 20-30 years.
Where? And how do you plan on making them grow? There is a lot of open space in Africa, but a large amount of it's not fit for trees.
And if your solution is to water them, it instantly becomes infeasible. Plus you need to make sure that poor people don't cut them down and burn them, farm the land, or sell the timber.
The catch is that Vista is at the edge of the amount of memory that can be supported with the 32 bit architecture. With XP, when prices for ram fell, you could add an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more memory. If you have 32 bit Vista, you pretty much need a new computer to add memory. Add in video cards now pushing 1/2 gb of memory, and Vista 32 can't expand like XP could.
The problem is that while no one can be good at everything, many of us have an expectation that they will at least TRY to be minimally competent at most things.
I don't expect everyone around me to be skilled doctors, but I do expect them to have a basic understanding of first aid, and be able to recognize, assist, and call for help in an emergency.
Likewise, I don't expect people around me to be able to kernel-hack and run stack tracers, but I do expect them to be able to recognize an issue, and do some basic trouble-shooting.
My sister, normally fairly intelligent, failed to do just this the other night. Somehow, between switching login sessions, her browser reversed the text order in input fields. Typing a login, the letters appeared from right to left. "AAAAAHHH! FIX IT!", she ordered me. "Does it still do that after you restart the browser?", I asked. "I haven't restarted it," was the reply.
Before turning to the computer guy, most of us expect that users will do some very basic troubleshooting. Restart, and see if the problem persists. Think back, and see if you recently made any system changes, or installed any new programs. Read error messages. Just because I know about computers doesn't mean I am at your disposal to diagnose and fix all problems. Sure, I can help with the tough ones. But many problems can be solved with a minimal amount of knowledge, and a few basic skills.
I don't need to waste my time, when you haven't spent an iota of yours trying to fix YOUR problem. If you haven't spent 10 minutes diagnosing it and trying to fix it, then you're not doing your part to screen stupid problems from me. You're just being needy and lazy.
And there's a big difference between being needy and lazy and being out of your area of expertise.
It looks like you highlight two interesting issues:
Outlawing possession of something which can nearly instantly be duplicated and transmitted around the world is stupid. We're already seeing what a mess the various media companies are making in trying to do this. I would propose that possession can't ever be usefully applied to electronic media. At its base level, this is because all electronic media is, is a bunch of 1s and 0s. At a higher level, "possession" can happen by clicking the wrong link, installing the wrong software, letting someone borrow your equipment, and by owning used equipment. None of these things apply to a box filled with pictures, or even the mid-ground, one filled with video tapes.
The second interesting issue is the ever-popular "make a law to make illegal something already covered by other laws". Almost without fail these new laws overreach their bounds, and cause all sorts of issues. There are already laws against both the grooming of children for sex and the showing of porn to minors. Using a grooming argument to outlaw possession is a good example of the massive issues which can arise when you use something already illegal to justify more laws.
I really haven't followed any of the legal history of porn, and would have to thank you for being such a scholar. (:p) I'd have to agree that the case you mentioned is a very bad precident. What's interesting is the psychology behind it. Any kids watching it would have no idea what was going on. It's just the adults that understand, and that doesn't harm kids. Unless the adults then go and harm kids. But we have laws for that already.
I wonder if there could ever be enough support for a "Legal Simplification" political party. I guess it will have to wait until I'm Emperor.
I did the same thing for our small, semi-private forums awhile back. I added about six questions on either the subject matter of the site or the colors on the page, or how to best dispatch spammers. Our spammers immediately went to 0, since it would actually take a tiny bit of human interaction to create a login.
Any idea where the "nude = porn" mentality came from? For thousands of years, there was a difference between nude and porn. Taking a picture of your 1-3 year old kids playing in a bathtub, covered with suds, is not child porn. Yet under most current laws, it could be prosecuted as such.
Where did your point number two disappear? When did a nude photo become "porn" in any sense? Are we going to start burning 12-15th century paintings now, because they "depict child porn"? Destroying Greek and Roman statues? Hell, even the Sistine Chapel might be in trouble. Those cherubs look a pretty young...
I teach 9-12 science in a rural, poor school. It's the same here. 1-2 ambitious kids, and the rest are slackers. Science courses have been cut and rolled together to reduce the number of teachers, in good part due to lower enrollment. While this year is a fluke (I hope) our senior-level math and science courses have 1/2 the students of last year. However, this is part of a continuing trend downward over the last several years.
In great part, there is no ability to THINK in these kids. As you see, If they can't either write it down or memorize it, they don't want to do it. They even get in trouble for doing stupid things, because they can't creatively think how not to get caught. I see only a glimmer of the genius that I employed in HS to cause trouble.
Kids are getting caught texting in class on a regular basis. We linked two graphing calculators with a cable under a desk and wrote a blackjack game which allowed each player to bet. In math and science, it looked like we were really busy. I had modified pens which would launch things across the room, now kids get in trouble for baseball pitches.
Creativity and logic are dead. And I'm looking towards a PhD to teach at the college level. I'm getting dumber every day I spend in HS.
I'm not sure I see what the question is here. If the students "essentially own the computers", and they take them home to their own network, on their own time, why would you be restricting them at all?
Your network on your time? Sure. Restrict away. I'd bet there is already a school proxy for the computer labs there.
I wonder if it doesn't come down to the wording of the state laws. Does the school district have to restrict all of its machines, machines on campus, or machines connecting to the school's network? I'd bet that the latter is the most likely.
And thus the reason I avoid just about anything with the word "blog" in it. If you can't come up with something better to describe what you do than a buzz-word associated with a myriad of crappy sites, than the chances you are generating useful content is probably near zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Ding! Score one, Lord Ender!
I actually bought a netbook specifically so I wouldn't waste money trying to upgrade it. It should always be able to browse, IM, ssh, and type simple documents. Any upgrade money is specifically designated for the desktop.
Even with such plugins, I've finally given up on the load of shit at CNN.com. When a misclick on a trackpad sent me to a bare list of 25 things it was OK to lie about in a relationship, I was pushed over the edge. To link an oprah-inspired, content-less list from the main page is the height of stupidity.
BBC news, my local (crappy) newspaper, and NPR are my online news sources now. The only thing that will save journalism is when news organizations stop fucking around, and start doing their god damn job. Cutting staff and making flash widgits is not it. Repeating the same three "news" stories over and over all day is not it. Reporting on the latest "white female gone missing" is not it. Reporting on the daily "fear the terrorists" is not it. Reporting on the latest celebrity screwup is not it.
Your job is to report news. Fucking do it, and your job will be saved.
I'm a teacher. Probably one of the top tech-savvy ones at my school, and also a linux dork.
My sister's BF uses linux a lot now, since I pointed him to it. My sister also uses it a lot. As does my mom, who now, instead bitching about her "computer" bitches specifically about Microsoft. The linux side of her dual-boot gets nothing but praise.
In any school, 80% of the teachers don't really know how to use a computer. They really are novices. In this case, there is NO difference between Linux and Windows. They probably wouldn't notice a difference if you swapped out their Windows machine for a KDE machine. (Gnome is enough different that they might notice. MIGHT notice..)
Flashaback to my mom's computer. My sister (Windows-only librarian) wanted to steal some of mom's Christmas CDs. I suggested she infringe on the copyrights by making a copy. (She's got both eyes, and both legs, so I couldn't suggest piracy.) She booted into Kubuntu, popped the CD into one drive, a blank into the second, found K3b, and burned herself a couple of CDs.
If she can do that, with 0 assistance, I'm confident that most teachers could use linux as well as windows. But why does EVERY school run windows?
It's a combination of a few factors.
1) The Admins know that Windows runs on 80+% of the computers in the world, and have used it exclusively.
2) A technology grant (in my State, a lawsuit against MS got it for us) buys both the hardware AND gets free MS software with it.
3) One essential piece of software (Gradequick, in my case) runs on Windows only.
I talk to my head tech guy often about different flavors of linux, and our collective playing around with it. He's not ignorant. But when a settlement from MS pays for all the hardware AND software for our school, why would he reformat it to run linux? It would be incompatable with a few major applications, and a major pain in the ass, as we'd then be running two operating systems. For a small tech staff, with limited resources, homogeneity is a necessity. (But he's still made sure that my linux laptop can connect to the wireless.)
Have you looked into the APT tax? It was designed to tax transactions such as those you describe. In fact, that's ALL it taxes - transactions. Just a theory at the moment, but I can see where it's becoming very implementable.
To expand on this, a large percentage of the decent-to-amazing IT workers are smarter than their co-workers. All businesses need worker-ants. Bodies to answer phones, tally numbers, clean the offices, and interface with customers and higher-ups in the company.
None of these jobs explicitly requires intelligence. None of them require the ability to problem-solve, to creatively find solutions to seemingly impossible problems, to make things do things they aren't meant to do.
While I only spent a few years in IT, before moving into the job-security and summers-off of education, I realized this quite well. I also had co-workers who realized this, and would put in obscene hours "keeping the company afloat". I did not. Why? Because while I was smarter than a lot of my co-workers, I also realized that I would see NO benefit from busting my ass doing over-time work. There would be no promotion, no additional job security, no additional pay, no accolades from the higher-ups in the business.
I was pretty glad that this had been my attitude when lay-offs came, because they were pointy-haired-boss style. Our corporate overlord did random lay-offs. RANDOM! Not need-based, not performance-based, not cost-benefit-analysis-based. RANDOM! People who had been working there 2 weeks to 15 years got laid off in a mass purging, at RANDOM! Had I been busting my ass up until I got that pink slip, I would have been pissed. As were a couple of the account executives who had been putting in serious OT to save "important" accounts.
IT gets shat upon because IT lets it happen. Mix Ego with poor social skills, no backbone, and a fear of the uncertain, and it's all but certain that you'll get trod upon.
Saying "Fuck NO!" is as likely to get you fired/laid off as not saying anything at all. And it's far more satisfying.
This is all part of his economic stimulus plan.
Step 1) Delay Digital switchover.
Step2) The US Govt buys stock in consumer electronic companies, along with Walmart.
Step 3) Change over to digital broadcasting. 25% of users suddenly find out that their TV no longer works.
Step 4) Issue the planned $500 tax rebate to all US taxpayers.
Step 5) 25% of the country goes and buys a new TV or a converter box to make their TV work again.
Step 6).... (You know what it is...and it's not acceptance...)
It wasn't just them. The captain of this ship is the one with his hands on the wheel. The original plan did not include a great deal of what ended up in the final project. While outside forces were at work, blame there lies squarely on the leadership of the project.
Now if he could only find the right story to post it to, we'd be all set!
You are pretty much spot on. I'd clarify by saying that the 2 best ways to fix our energy problems are:
1) Raise electricity rates.
2) Mandate clear ratings to be placed on ALL electronics which state Maximum, Median, Sleep, and Off electricity usage.
Then your point about Capitalism would work just fine. The problem now is that it takes a third-party device like the kill-o-watt meter to determine these things for most consumer electronics. Remove that barrier, and the free market would have a much better chance of working.
Hop the border to your North-East then. In Vermont, it's legal to have a loaded handgun on the dashboard of your truck. (Or car, but who drives one of those things?) It's NOT legal to drive around with a loaded rifle, because you might shoot a deer with it. But pistols are fine. No handgun permit needed. There's no concealed carry law in the state, but individual cities sometimes have some variant, and you can't bring firearms into Schools and Courts. It seems that Government Buildings and Churches are fine.
As some friends of mine have explored, it's perfectly legal to tuck a loaded handgun into the back of you pants, drive down the the store, buy a gallon of milk, and drive back. As long as you aren't reckless or threatening, it's just fine.
(The same goes for nudity around here as well. No state law on public nudity, although some towns have them. It's perfectly legal to grab your wallet, get into your truck nude, drive to the store, walk in, buy a gallon of milk, and drive home. As long as you don't do anything obscene, you're fine. Despite this, we have few problems with either nudity or handguns. Or nudes with handguns. It's probably because a large part of this state is, oddly enough, very conservative. And we have winter, which severely curtails the amount of public nudity people are interested in engaging in.)
You are mostly correct in your assessment looking in. Our ties between financing campaigns and favors afterwards are well known and fairly well documented. While politicians occasionally get charged with corruption, I'd hazard a guess that it's probably only the top 1-2% of offenders, at best.
The one area you're not quite correct is in where the money actually comes from. This page shows summarized contributions from corporations, their Political Action Comities, and their employees. As you can see, it's far smaller than the total amount of funding Obama received. If you look at the voting records, Obama received around 62 million votes. If 5% of those individuals tossed $100 his direction, that's around half of his total funding, and 25 times more than he received from corporate ties.
In most elections, that would seem pretty high, and fairly unlikely. However, this was a pretty special case for us. As a whole, the country HATES President Bush. When McCain ran against Bush in 2000, he ran as a rebel, an anti-republican republican. After being crushed there, with the Bush campaign managing to smear his time as a POW and drawing into question the legitimacy of his daughter, he turned into Bush's lapdog. Nobody can really figure out why, but McCain went from being against much of the republican machine to being a cog in it.
Which such a public dislike for Bush, and with McCain viewed as being just more of the same, a lot more people in this election felt it was worth a couple hundred bucks to ensure that we would be able to get out of Iraq and fix our economy.
(But this doesn't mean that your complaint about corporate rule is in any-way unjustified. It's why I tell everyone we need another party, and it's why I refuse to vote for either party any more. )
What's the chance I can start a LLC to sell weed? I mean, doing illegal things and avoiding jail time seems to work for most large corporations. What's the size/financial cutoff where I won't go to jail?
I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. I installed Kubuntu 8.10, and never looked back. KDE 4.2 works fine, and does what I need it to do. Now I don't know if that's because I'm not a GUI-power-user or something, but what the hell?
I know a fair number of people who have had all sorts of issues with KDE 4. I haven't had a single problem. Granted I do most of my power-user work via the terminal, but I would have assumed I'd have seen one of the myriad of issues being reported. I'm trying to think of one, and failing. Maybe somewhat flakey wireless connections on my EEE?
The side effect of medicine occasionally kills a person, or a few. Perhaps a few thousand, if bad enough.
The side effects of geoengineering could kill EVERYTHING.
There should be at least some care taken before any major operation is undertaken, with that in mind.
Not to mention that it might interfere with my plan to buy up land in Florida a half-mile from the ocean, and sell it as waterfront property in 20-30 years.
Where? And how do you plan on making them grow? There is a lot of open space in Africa, but a large amount of it's not fit for trees.
And if your solution is to water them, it instantly becomes infeasible. Plus you need to make sure that poor people don't cut them down and burn them, farm the land, or sell the timber.
Not to mention that trees might not fix the problem.
The catch is that Vista is at the edge of the amount of memory that can be supported with the 32 bit architecture. With XP, when prices for ram fell, you could add an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more memory. If you have 32 bit Vista, you pretty much need a new computer to add memory. Add in video cards now pushing 1/2 gb of memory, and Vista 32 can't expand like XP could.
The problem is that while no one can be good at everything, many of us have an expectation that they will at least TRY to be minimally competent at most things.
I don't expect everyone around me to be skilled doctors, but I do expect them to have a basic understanding of first aid, and be able to recognize, assist, and call for help in an emergency.
Likewise, I don't expect people around me to be able to kernel-hack and run stack tracers, but I do expect them to be able to recognize an issue, and do some basic trouble-shooting.
My sister, normally fairly intelligent, failed to do just this the other night. Somehow, between switching login sessions, her browser reversed the text order in input fields. Typing a login, the letters appeared from right to left. "AAAAAHHH! FIX IT!", she ordered me. "Does it still do that after you restart the browser?", I asked. "I haven't restarted it," was the reply.
Before turning to the computer guy, most of us expect that users will do some very basic troubleshooting. Restart, and see if the problem persists. Think back, and see if you recently made any system changes, or installed any new programs. Read error messages. Just because I know about computers doesn't mean I am at your disposal to diagnose and fix all problems. Sure, I can help with the tough ones. But many problems can be solved with a minimal amount of knowledge, and a few basic skills.
I don't need to waste my time, when you haven't spent an iota of yours trying to fix YOUR problem. If you haven't spent 10 minutes diagnosing it and trying to fix it, then you're not doing your part to screen stupid problems from me. You're just being needy and lazy.
And there's a big difference between being needy and lazy and being out of your area of expertise.
It looks like you highlight two interesting issues:
Outlawing possession of something which can nearly instantly be duplicated and transmitted around the world is stupid. We're already seeing what a mess the various media companies are making in trying to do this. I would propose that possession can't ever be usefully applied to electronic media. At its base level, this is because all electronic media is, is a bunch of 1s and 0s. At a higher level, "possession" can happen by clicking the wrong link, installing the wrong software, letting someone borrow your equipment, and by owning used equipment. None of these things apply to a box filled with pictures, or even the mid-ground, one filled with video tapes.
The second interesting issue is the ever-popular "make a law to make illegal something already covered by other laws". Almost without fail these new laws overreach their bounds, and cause all sorts of issues. There are already laws against both the grooming of children for sex and the showing of porn to minors. Using a grooming argument to outlaw possession is a good example of the massive issues which can arise when you use something already illegal to justify more laws.
I really haven't followed any of the legal history of porn, and would have to thank you for being such a scholar. (:p) I'd have to agree that the case you mentioned is a very bad precident. What's interesting is the psychology behind it. Any kids watching it would have no idea what was going on. It's just the adults that understand, and that doesn't harm kids. Unless the adults then go and harm kids. But we have laws for that already.
I wonder if there could ever be enough support for a "Legal Simplification" political party. I guess it will have to wait until I'm Emperor.
I did the same thing for our small, semi-private forums awhile back. I added about six questions on either the subject matter of the site or the colors on the page, or how to best dispatch spammers. Our spammers immediately went to 0, since it would actually take a tiny bit of human interaction to create a login.
Any idea where the "nude = porn" mentality came from? For thousands of years, there was a difference between nude and porn. Taking a picture of your 1-3 year old kids playing in a bathtub, covered with suds, is not child porn. Yet under most current laws, it could be prosecuted as such.
Where did your point number two disappear? When did a nude photo become "porn" in any sense? Are we going to start burning 12-15th century paintings now, because they "depict child porn"? Destroying Greek and Roman statues? Hell, even the Sistine Chapel might be in trouble. Those cherubs look a pretty young...
Seriously - if she doesn't need anything really windows-specific, go with Ubuntu.
Did you not see the big group masturbation up above here?
(Seriously - my mom is another who is well served by linux. The only issue is integration with her new iPod an various podcast sites. )
I teach 9-12 science in a rural, poor school. It's the same here. 1-2 ambitious kids, and the rest are slackers. Science courses have been cut and rolled together to reduce the number of teachers, in good part due to lower enrollment. While this year is a fluke (I hope) our senior-level math and science courses have 1/2 the students of last year. However, this is part of a continuing trend downward over the last several years.
In great part, there is no ability to THINK in these kids. As you see, If they can't either write it down or memorize it, they don't want to do it. They even get in trouble for doing stupid things, because they can't creatively think how not to get caught. I see only a glimmer of the genius that I employed in HS to cause trouble.
Kids are getting caught texting in class on a regular basis. We linked two graphing calculators with a cable under a desk and wrote a blackjack game which allowed each player to bet. In math and science, it looked like we were really busy. I had modified pens which would launch things across the room, now kids get in trouble for baseball pitches.
Creativity and logic are dead. And I'm looking towards a PhD to teach at the college level. I'm getting dumber every day I spend in HS.
Eat, shit, and get really fat while being constantly injected with massive doses of hormones and antibiotics to keep them alive.
It's a mirror for modern American life.
(You fresh-air, aerobic-loving hippy. Or do your birds not mirror your personal existence?)
I'm not sure I see what the question is here. If the students "essentially own the computers", and they take them home to their own network, on their own time, why would you be restricting them at all?
Your network on your time? Sure. Restrict away. I'd bet there is already a school proxy for the computer labs there.
I wonder if it doesn't come down to the wording of the state laws. Does the school district have to restrict all of its machines, machines on campus, or machines connecting to the school's network? I'd bet that the latter is the most likely.
And thus the reason I avoid just about anything with the word "blog" in it. If you can't come up with something better to describe what you do than a buzz-word associated with a myriad of crappy sites, than the chances you are generating useful content is probably near zero.